I still haven’t quite gotten into the stride of this yet; it’s been a long time since I wrote regular blog posts for anything except a job and it’s more difficult than I anticipated getting back into the habit. So this week, I thought I’d write about something that I always have thoughts on: research.

It depends on how you look at it whether the early research on any project is a challenge or an opportunity or a challenging opportunity. Some folks hate it: it’s too disorganized, too many rabbitholes, too many dead ends. Others love it: everything’s wide open, full of potential, it’s all related. I generally fall into the second category but I admit to suffering from anxiety because of the stage I think of as ‘thrashing around’ and TNP is still very much in the ‘thrashing around’ stages.

‘Thrashing around’ describes the stage where you’re opening library catalogs and putting in the broadest possible terms (“Middle East — history”) to describe the subject matter you’re working on (or want to work on) and then scrolling endlessly through results until it starts to feel like the entire world is made up of things that relate to your topic but not anything actually helpful and you lose all hope and— No. Wait. You definitely do not lose hope, but overwhelm is a very real thing. If you’re like me and tend to think laterally as a matter of habit, everything seems related.

If all goes well, ‘thrashing around’ can turn out to be a really productive part of the process, rather like mind-mapping or the kind of collation of research ideas that Raul Pacheco-Vega describes so well on his blog. (Seriously, if you’re into research methods and you don’t know his blog yet, you have a treat coming.) Just from doing library or Google searches, you can start to get a feeling for what’s connected to what or, as importantly, what people think is connected to what. (That’s probably a whole ‘nother blog post: discriminating between what is actually connected and what has become connected through, shall we say, the (dubious) wisdom of the crowd.)

But it can also feel like getting a waterfall dumped on your head when what you wanted was a spritz in the face and your actual desired topic starts to feel so far off it’s like you’ll never get to it at all. However. The only thing to be done — unless you decide to give up altogether — is to keep going, make your lists, make your notes, refine your searches, and trust that the process works because it has worked before.